The Waters of Edera eBook

Nerina slept on in peace and without dreams.
Now and then another rose let fall some petals on
her, or a bee buzzed above her, but her repose remained
undisturbed.

The good food filled her, even in her sleep, with
deep contentment, and the brain, well nourished by
the blood, was still.

Clelia Alba felt her heart soften despite herself
for this lonely creature; though she was always suspicious
of her, for she had never known any good thing come
down from the high mountains, but only theft and arson
and murder, and men banded together to solace their
poverty with crime. In her youth the great brigands
of the Upper Abruzzo had been names of terror in Ruscino,
and in the hamlets lying along the course of the Edera,
and many a time a letter written in blood had been
fastened with a dagger to the door of church or cottage,
intimating the will of the unseen chief to the subjugated
population. Of late years less had been heard
and seen of such men; but they or their like were
still heard and felt sometimes, up above in lonely
forests, or down where the moorland and macchia met,
and the water of Edera ran deep and lonely. In
her girlhood, a father, a son, and a grandson had
been all killed on a lonely part of the higher valley
because they had dared to occupy a farm and a water-mill
after one of these hillmen had laid down the law that
no one was to live on the land or to set the waterwheel
moving.

That had been a good way off, indeed, and for many
a year the Edera had not seen the masked men, with
their belts, crammed with arms and gold, round their
loins; but still, one never knew, she thought; unbidden
guests were oftener devils than angels.

And it seemed to her that the child could not really
be asleep all this time in a strange place and the
open air. At last she got up, went again to the
bench and drew her handkerchief aside, and looked
down on the sleeper; on the thin, narrow chest, the
small, bony hands, the tiny virginal nipples like
wood strawberries.

She saw that the slumber was real, the girl very young
and more than half-starved. “Let her forget
while she can,” she thought, and covered her
face again. “It is still early in the day.”

The bees hummed on; a low wind swept over a full-blown
rose and shook its loose leaves to the ground.
The shadow from the ruined tower began to touch the
field which lay nearest the river, a sign that it
was two hours after noon.

II

The large square fresh-water fishing-net had sunk
under the surface, the canes which framed it were
out of sight; only the great central pole, which sustained
the whole, and was planted in the ground of the river-bank,
remained visible as it bent and swayed but did not
yield or break. Such nets as this had been washed
by the clear green waters of the pools and torrents
of the Edera ever since the days of Etruscan gods
and Latin augurs; religions had changed, but the river,
and the ways of the men of the river, had not altered.